Customer experience management
Branches are a key element in Nationwide’s business model, and have largely remained open – though of course serving fewer customers. Indeed, they were a key focus of the five-year, £1.3bn programme of technology investment the bank announced back in 2018.
Nationwide is finding new ways of supporting its customers as fewer people bank in-store.
Nationwide Building Society is the world’s largest building society and one of the few remaining mutuals. Owned by its members, as it calls its customers, it has built a track record of innovation since it opened 130 years ago. For instance, it launched the first interest-paying current account in the 1980s and is currently building a digital innovation centre in London to train its workforce.
The Covid curveball
In 2010, Nationwide began a journey to transform its CX, and since then it has become one of the UK’s best service brands, according to KPMG’s 2018 Customer Experience Excellence survey. “Customer experience has always been at the heart of what we do as a building society,” says Janet Chapman, director and mission leader for Moments that Matter at Nationwide. “As a mutual, our original purpose was to help people build and then buy their own home. So, our members own the society and they need a caring and responsible service from us. We need to respond to the way people want to interact with us, and we have always done that quickly, including members’ needs for more channels.”
50% Accenture 44
Since the onset of the pandemic, half of customers now interact with their bank through mobile apps or websites at least once a week, compared with 32% two years ago.
The pandemic has served as a catalyst for Nationwide and its competitors, as customers have suddenly and dramatically changed their banking behaviour since March 2020. Priority one was to ensure business continuity. In practice, that meant guaranteeing that systems and processes were in place to handle remote banking transactions. With customers stuck at home, and less traffic coming to branches, this meant facilitating the shift to digital channels, while still delivering a reliable and comforting customer experience.
“It is a challenge to provide services during a pandemic, but Covid has certainly accelerated the existing changes that were happening in terms of how people want to access them,” Chapman explains. “We had to adapt quickly to serve our members.”
Among other things, the programme contained a commitment to maintain Nationwide’s branch network, which will receive £350m of investment over the same five-year period to deliver more open- plan spaces, new technology like iPads, free Wi-Fi– as well as a video link service to connect customers to teams of personal banking managers and specialist consultants. The idea is that customers can manage their finances in a branch, via the mobile app, by telephone, online or by post – with consistent service regardless of channel. “We have kept branches open but only for essential services, which has accelerated the move towards mobile,” Chapman explains. “We are also encouraging members to access in-branch services through ATMs. It is all about having the flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. So much has happened in the last year and it has accelerated change around different channels.”
Since the start of the pandemic, in fact, Nationwide has seen 600,000 new registrations to its mobile services. Meanwhile, staff in branches have been redeployed where possible, with some taking calls from members in support of call the bank’s call centres.
The new and the old If Nationwide is a stalwart of the UK’s financial services sector, the new kid on the block is Metro Bank. It was established as the UK’s first challenger bank in a century and in July 2020, as the pandemic raged, marked its ten-year anniversary. From the outset, Metro Bank’s business proposition has been built on customer service, both in-branch and online, and it has invested heavily in its network of branches or, as it calls them, stores. These stores are intended to be focal points for the local community, so Covid-related restrictions have presented a major challenge to that model. “It is all about creating fans,” explains Kat Robinson, Metro Bank’s director of customer experience. “The customer runs like a thread throughout our whole business model. Our stores are important to us, and all of them have stayed open during the pandemic, but now the multi-channel offering is just as important.” Metro Bank saw an 8% rise in digital or mobile interactions in the first half of 2020, and phone calls to the bank are up by 27% since the start of the pandemic.
“The challenge is to try to support customers in the ways they want to bank with us,” adds Robinson. “There are fewer customers coming into the stores,
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
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